Photo of a Maidu family, 1906 (William
Thunen, photographer)
LCCN 2020635536
Edna Hillman was born around 1891 in Greenville, California, to George
and Maggie Hillman. She is known to have
had two brothers.
Government and school records describe Edna as a full-blood Digger Indian. That was a somewhat pejorative term applied to many tribes that lived in the Great Basin regions of Utah, Nevada and northern California. The area around Greenville was home to the Maidu tribe, so it is likely that she was Maidu.
The Maidu were hunter-gatherers who typically lived in dugouts and subsisted on acorns, game, seeds and edible roots, hence the name. During the Gold Rush years, the Maidu were dispossessed of their lands and decimated by diseases to which they had no immunity.
Her parents having died, Edna was enrolled in a boarding school in California in 1897. She was a Methodist; it is not known whether that was by choice or because the school that took her in happened to be Methodist.
By all accounts, Edna was a good student. Since she was 19 and an orphan, she herself signed the permissions to attend Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania for five years. A Carlisle trade school education was the best available to Native Americans of the turn of the century. Edna’s classes would probably have focused on practical skills such as cooking, sewing and nursing.
When Edna arrived at Carlisle on October 9, 1910, she was 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighed 133 pounds. However, she entered the school’s hospital in August 1911, where she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Her medical records show what she was fed. She was sometimes nauseous and often refused the milk and eggnog that was pressed upon her (many Native Americans are lactose-intolerant).
By November 1911, Edna was failing rapidly. Having no family left in California to care for her, she asked to be sent to a government sanitarium in Phoenix. She left the school on December 11 but, by the time she reached Phoenix, it was clear that she was too far gone to recover. She died on January 22, 1912, and was buried in Rosedale Cemetery.
-by Donna Carr
